


little yellow sun

by blackeyedblonde



Category: True Detective
Genre: Friendship/Love, Gen, Hospitalization, Injury Recovery, Light Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-11
Updated: 2017-02-11
Packaged: 2018-09-23 11:36:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9655661
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blackeyedblonde/pseuds/blackeyedblonde
Summary: “You surprised I’m just as red-blooded as you are?” Rust says, more of a tired breath let loose than anything meant to be mean. His eyes are slipping shut again, slowly but surely, and he fights to keep them focused on Marty’s battered face.“Nah,” Marty says, but there’s a little touch of something shining in his eye. “I wouldn’t say that.”





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hartcohle (karategirl448)](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=hartcohle+%28karategirl448%29), [mariesondetre](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mariesondetre/gifts).



> I know I said I wouldn't be back around these parts for a while, but then this bizarro idea got caught in my head and I figured what the hell, let me round out my titled contributions for the True Detective fandom into an even 20.
> 
> A small gift for Allie and Marie, for their kindness in helping out a friend ❤

 

  
  
Rust opens his eyes again on a Tuesday, three minutes past four o’clock in the morning. It’s dark in the room, quiet save for the mechanical beep and trill of something he can’t see yet, and he blinks at the tiny pinpricks of green and yellow light twinkling like lightning bugs at his left.

There’s a thin line bouncing on a dimly lit screen, moving up and down as he breathes in shallow puffs of oxygen through the cannula in his nose. His chest is tight, nearly aching but not quite, with dull tension running down his middle until it almost reaches his groin. There’s a strange pressure there, but it’s muted and distant for the moment. An afterthought.

Rust’s bleary eyes follow the line bouncing on the screen for a moment or two longer before he realizes he’s watching the timed beat of his own heart. He brings his left palm up to his face, slowly when he feels the taped IV port tug at the back of his hand, and is almost surprised to find he hasn’t been cuffed to the bedrail this time.

Whiskers are coarse beneath his fingertips, and his skin feels clammy but cleaner than the last time he cared to remember. His lips are dry and he wishes for a drink of water, but a tinge of nausea in the back of his throat says otherwise. His eyes feel darkly bruised and swollen but there is no pain beyond knowing that they should feel tender.

The realization of being alive manifests like a feather falling on the narrow hospital bed he’s lying in. Something he watches float down from the ceiling through the fugue of whatever drugs they’re pumping through him in waves.

He cries for a while, silently in the dark, until his ruined body succumbs to the pull of sleep again. The telltale beat of his heart keeps him company, following him back into a deeper kind of dark.  
  


* * *  
  


There’s a pleasant coolness around his eyes and on his forehead. Somebody is humming, maybe, from far away but somehow still overhead. Rust listens to the voice for a few moments and lets his face be washed before he gathers the strength to move one of his hands and finally crack open an eye. The humming has been coming from a dark-skinned woman with her hair tucked up under a scrub cap, save for a curly wisp or two poking out. Her uniform top is printed with what might be colorful tree frogs.

Rust thinks he says something about water, but he isn’t sure if it came out right or not. His throat feels like sandpaper and the word spills with all the finesse of dry gravel over his tongue.

The nurse doesn’t scream, but she drops the damp cloth on his chest and takes a quick step backward. Her eyes are wide behind her glasses but then turn immediately concerned, and she comes right back in with her cold hands to tip his head up toward what looks like a pink jug and a straw.

The water is flat and tepid, like it’d been waiting for him for a while now.

“Take a sip of that, honey, if you can,” she says, calm but clearly in a hurry now. “I need to go call the doctor.”

The doctor in question doesn’t come in for another twenty minutes, though when he does he’s still wearing blue operating room scrubs and a hair bonnet. He introduces himself as Dr. Singh and it appears he’s out of breath but trying to keep himself in check, as if he’d run a long distance to get here.

Dr. Singh flips through the monitor charting and asks routine questions about memory and pain threshold, as if what Rust feels and has felt could possibly be on a scale of one to ten. He smells like iodine and hospital soap when he gets close enough to shine a light in Rust’s eyes, then tests his grip and reflexes, feeling the glands in his neck and checking the wound on his arm before moving lower to pull back the sheet drawn up to his bare chest.

There is a small bundle of tubes and cords in the way, and Rust closes his eyes and tries to focus on his breathing. Cold hands feel around his stomach and apply gentle pressure, peeling back gauze so the cold air hits him like a knife, and he doesn’t want to look, he doesn’t want to—he doesn’t—

“Do you want to see this before I cover it back up?” Singh asks. Rust opens his eyes and finds the doctor and nurse staring back at him, but he won’t lower his gaze to what drew their attention in the first place.

“No,” he croaks, turning away to look out a small part in the window blinds. It’s daylight now, bright and golden in the rising wake of Louisiana summer. “When can I leave?”

Singh laughs quietly at that, though he takes care to gently cover up the sutures holding Rust together before resettling the sheet and blanket where they were before.

“It might be some time yet,” the doctor says, and nothing about it sounds like an apology. “You’ve been in a coma for nearly two days since surgery. The recovery period after the injuries you sustained, Mr. Cohle—well.” The rest of his speech is predicted with ease, an auspice snagged from the air like a bird with a broken wing. “I’d say you’re lucky to be having this conversation with me at all.”

It goes unsaid that everybody involved is surprised to find he’s still alive.

Exhaustion is crawling back in to take him and Rust tries to fight it off, weakly clenching at the bedsheets gathered around his thighs. They’re still slowly siphoning plasma bags into him and he wonders what would happen if he reached up and ripped the port out of his arm with an audience gathered to watch him do it.

Dr. Singh and nurse seem to be waiting for a response, and Rust doesn’t have one. At least not one they’d care to hear without putting him under mandatory psych eval for the next forty-eight hours.

Instead he feels a ghost of sudden panic rise high in his throat, and he turns to look at them again with something hot and painful burning behind his eyes.

“Where’s Marty?”  


  
  
  


Marty’s laughter heralds his arrival.

Rust is sitting up today, awake but barely there. The TV in his room has been droning on all morning and he hasn’t touched any of the food the nurse—Miss June, he knows now—deposited and tried to ration out on the bedside table. Saltine and graham crackers, a cup of jello, some orange juice. He doesn’t want any of it.

There is something else there, though, that he hadn’t noticed before. A tiny little potted plant of some sort, single and no bigger than his thumb. Might be some kind of succulent or cactus, but Rust doesn’t know for sure. What he does know, however, is that somebody had bothered to paint a little yellow sun on the terracotta pot.

“Ain’t you a pretty sight,” Marty says, and he’s suddenly there and laughing aloud, letting one of the other nurses roll him into Rust’s room in a hospital-issue wheelchair strung up with an IV bag.

Marty’s not looking at the blonde-headed young gal in pink scrubs when he says it, and all Rust can do is gaze back. Mirth seems to cause Marty some pain because he reaches up to press a hand against something hidden beneath his hospital gown while he laughs, but it must not be bad enough to make him stop.

“How you feeling, man?” he asks, slowly rolling himself closer to Rust once the nurse leaves them alone. The laughter dies away and his face shifts some, still bright but verging on something else now, too. “It’s so fucking good to see you awake, Rust—shit. God damn.”

Rust blinks at Marty and feels like he could cry, just for a split second, but it doesn’t last long enough to spill over. He finds the next readily available pool of emotion and decides to dip his response from that instead. “There ain’t much use in you asking when we both know, Marty, that I’m not exactly in top fuckin’ form right now.”

“Well hell, me either,” Marty snorts, unfazed by Rust’s tired attempt to sass him. He pulls the neck of his hospital gown down to show off a thick patch of gauze and a wound drain taped up around his collarbone. “Piece of shit fucking tomahawk’ed my ass. Got me pretty good, but not as good as you.”

He goes quiet for a few long seconds after that, clearing his throat while his eyes rove around the walls like it’s suddenly a penthouse suite instead of a hospital room. They linger for a moment on the tiny potted plant, but not long enough for Rust to take much notice.

“Your plasma is just about empty,” Marty says, nodding at the bag in question hanging on the pole beside Rust’s bed. “Bet that’s the last unit they’ll give you, so long as you keep on the mend.”

Rust doesn’t bother to look at it, though he touches two fingers to the back of the IV port in his hand. This is some of Marty’s old attempt at small talk, or maybe it’s not old at all. There’s the faint urge to smile, surprisingly, but the muscles in Rust’s face are too damn tired to cooperate just yet.

“I was surprised, y’know,” Marty keeps on after a moment of quiet. He fidgets with the tube in his own hand, picking some at the surgical tape keeping it in place. There’s a bruise there from a blown vein and he presses on it a little, wincing at the minor pain. “Turns out you and me have the same damn blood type, rare as it is. Who woulda thought.”

“You surprised I’m just as red-blooded as you are?” Rust says, more of a tired breath let loose than anything meant to be mean. His eyes are slipping shut again, slowly but surely, and he fights to keep them focused on Marty’s battered face.

“Nah,” Marty says, but there’s a little touch of something shining in his eye. “I wouldn’t say that.”

He scoots closer to Rust’s bed, inching along as best his socked feet will take him. Eyeballs the spread of untouched snacks on the side table with a little furrow drawn between his eyes.

“You don’t want your jello?” he asks, like Rust had left a fifty-dollar porterhouse steak and sautéed mushrooms there instead. “Or any of these crackers here?”

“No,” Rust says, sinking further back into his pillows. There’s a midmorning talk show running on the TV, full of glossy-haired women clucking away about things he doesn’t care about. “Don’t want none of it. Take it.”

“Well, what _do_ you like?” Marty asks, though he reaches up to swipe the cherry jello before plopping it into his lap. “Maybe something in particular.”

Rust closes his eyes and breathes out slow and deep. “Don’t see why you're asking me all this shit, Marty.”

He expects some bullshit answer, some brush-off excuse, but Marty’s voice is firmly decided when it comes back in quick. “Maybe so I’ll fucking know what to keep around when your bony ass comes by the house to visit once you get outta here,” he says. “How about that?”

“You don’t need t’do it,” Rust says, voice slurring a little. His morphine drip must’ve kicked in again, and maybe he’s been surprised more than anyone that it even worked to start with.

“And you can rest easy in knowin’ I’ll do it anyway,” Marty says, resolute, and then watches Rust’s chest slowly rise and fall when an answer isn’t forthcoming.

“Take it easy, man,” he says, quieter than before. He goes to wheel backwards out of the room, and Rust doesn’t really hear him leave but he might’ve felt a warm pressure on the back of his right hand for a fleeting moment. Thinks he hears Marty’s voice again, but it’s too far away to tell now.

_I’ll come back by tomorrow._  
  


* * *  
  


Miss June is back on Thursday morning, carrying a plastic pan full of warm water and a yellow bottle of what looks like baby shampoo. She sets both on the side table and busies herself with snapping on a pair of rubber gloves while Rust lets a mouthful of crushed ice melt on his tongue.

“Hair washing day, sugar,” she says, turning back around to tilt his bed back once she’s brought over a small stack of fresh towels. “Need to get you cleaned up a little bit.”

Rust looks sideways at the pan of warm water, and then up at the woman peering at him over the tops of her glasses. She’s seen every inch of his body from head to toe and probably more since he’s been here, but giving in to his honest-to-fucking-God desire to have some of the grimy feeling washed out of his scalp seems too easy.

“You don’t need to do that, Miss June,” he says, not quite meeting her eye. “I’ll manage something soon as I can get up and move around on my own.”

“Well the way I understand it, that may not be for a little while yet,” the nurse says, moving to fold up a towel behind Rust’s head. “And you know good and well it’ll help you feel better.”

He doesn’t make any move to stop her, but Miss June still purses her lips up at the tightened expression pulling around his eyes while she dampens a washcloth. “You want me to go get that new college-boy nurse to do this or are you gonna behave?”

Rust doesn’t have the energy to tell her this would be humiliating no matter who was doing it, if he even had the shame left to care. “Don’t bring that damn kid in here,” is all he says, closing his eyes as she starts pushing her fingers up through his hairline.

“Figured as much,” the nurse murmurs, though her hands are gentle and the warm water already feels like a dream. Rust knows the nurses have been good to him, considering all the kindness he’s given back in return, and maybe it wouldn’t kill him to show a little fucking gratitude. He’s sure Marty’s already made good on sweet-talking the best of them to the moon and back.

Miss June makes a quick job of her work, careful not to get any shampoo in his eyes, and does a decent enough job that Rust comes out clean and smelling faintly of baby-grade hospital soap when she’s done.

“There—you survived. And if you feel as better as you look, I’d say we’re in business,” the nurse says, dabbing up around the damp hair at the temples before snapping her gloves off. “Let those pretty waves shine.”

She tips Rust’s bed back up so he can look out the open blinds, then walks around to the opposite side of the room to check and squeeze his IV bag. The antibiotic fluids are hooked up nearby, and by lunchtime it’ll scream out on a timer until somebody comes to change it. Rust imagines he’s so full of saline water and drugs that they’re probably running on a tide inside the hollow chambers of his body, now. Rise and fall as the moon waxes and wanes, all while he loses days to the numbness of not knowing anything anymore.

“Blood cell count looked good, last we checked,” Miss June says, standing at the computer to flip through her charting. “Took more than a couple bags to get you stabilized.”

“Marty told me…” Rust starts to say, and then wonders if this is too much to share. Two brown eyes glance up at him and he clears his throat, wets his bottom lip and decides he’s got nothing to lose but a little bit of conversation he didn’t need to be having anyway.

“Mister Hart said what now?” Miss June asks, shifting her weight over on to one hip where she still stands at the computer screen. “He better not be trying to bust you out of here yet.”

Rust shakes his head, looks down at the monitors stuck to his chest. His gown is pulled back enough that anybody looking can see the blue sigil above his heart, but nobody’s made any such move to ask what it is.

“Naw,” he says. “He wouldn’t do something like that.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure,” the nurse says, looking back up to start tapping away on her keyboard. “He may or may not have told me the other day that he’d be plenty willing to donate a pint of blood on a certain somebody’s behalf, if such occasion arose that a certain somebody got to needing it.”

The wound cut deep into Rust’s stomach prickles a little at the thought, briefly and painlessly, though he doesn’t really know why. He wishes Marty was in the room so he could snap at him, tell him not to say ridiculous fucking shit like that, but then he doesn’t know if he could look him in the face right now, either.

Even though Marty’d had no problem with that, not with the blood on his hands, even after—

“He shouldn’t think he’s got to spare anything on my account,” Rust says, clenching his jaw until it nearly pops. He doesn’t trust himself to say much else.

Miss June finishes with her charting and breezes back around to the other side of the bed, picking up her pan of soapy water and the little bottle of baby shampoo. The room around them still smells like it, warm and balmy and cleanly sweet.

“That man won’t do a damn thing if he thinks he’s _got_ to do it, honey,” she says, reaching up to fix a piece of damp hair on Rust’s forehead before stepping back. “The way I see, people who aren’t getting a paycheck usually only do something because they want to. And you can take me to the bank on that one.”

She leaves the room behind and Rust is alone again, this time with nothing but the muted television and the beeping machines. The mysterious terracotta pot painted with a sun is still setting next to his bed, too, with its unknown origins. Nobody had ever admitted to leaving it there, but then again he supposes nobody would really have to.

He shifts around in bed, wincing as the sutures in his right arm pull taut and his stomach stretches, but he doesn’t settle back in place until the tiny green cactus is balanced in the palm of his hand.

Rust holds up his thumb and presses the pad of it against the little yellow sun, and idly wonders if Marty would take him home if all he did was ask.  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> So much indulgent hospital-ness! I've spent my fair share of time in hospitals and recovered after a thyroidectomy surgery once or twice upon a time, but I don't claim to be an expert. I'm sorry if some (or most) of the terminology or drug names are incorrect.


End file.
